I still find it remarkable that Jellicoe was commanding the Grand Fleet at Jutland of several hundred warships and still managed to pull off an almost perfect deployment of the fleet with a communications system only marginally more advanced than Nelson had used at Trafalgar. His bigger flaw was using command and control to make up for a lack of quality amongst some of his senior admirals (ironically a greater level of command and control over Beatty may have improved matters such as getting Beatty to give better, more frequent and regular position and sighting reports)
A better High Seas Fleet for WW1
- Thread starter mack8
- Start date
But wasn't the "safety protocol" that, as tests had shown, cordite wasn't going to explode even when struck by shells, so therefore even exposed cordite wasn't going to make the ships explode?
That might be aplicable to just cordite and nothing more, but mix it with shells, fire, eletrical equipment, men running around...
To say that the HSF should " get an admiral who can grasp a new concept!" clearly implies that they did NOT have an admiral who could grasp a new concept. To say that Scheer, Hipper etc could not grasp new concepts sounds very much like an insult; grasping new concepts was part of their job.
The evidence seems clear thar the German navy's top brass COULD grasp new concepts. They ran the first modern sub campaign, they created a fleet that did quite well in the first major clashes of capital ships at sea for a lifetime, they ran the first real strategic bombing campaign, and the HSF's major leaders, Scheer and Hipper, had both made their careers in the fairly unproven new weapon of torpedoes. They grasped the new concept of torpedoes so eagerly that the German destroyers' design concentrated on torpedo rather than gun power - and then Jutland proved that torpedoes were actually much LESS effective in surface warfare than conventional big guns. The HSF fleet admirals may have grasped the new concept too deeply to see its very real limitations.
The British had bullets that could shoot down airships from September 1916, which means that these expensive weapons had a fairly short life becoming very vulnerable.
The "swarm of e boats" concept (which wasn't really new, of course) never really worked in any war. It's arguably something favoured only by people who haven't spent much time at sea and who don't understand the very harsh realities of life in a small vessel rolling and bouncing through swells, with all the accompanying problems of sighting, vision, and handling weapons and sensors. There's a reason that the navies increased the size of their small torpedo craft almost continually - the small ones didn't really work. "It looks so simple to those who have had the special features of craft like the C.M.B.'s explained to them to visualise the boats out night after night sinking and destroying. But it was not one night in twenty on the Belgian Coast that they could operate with success, and then the targets were few" wrote Admiral Bacon of the Dover Patrol, which had extensive experience in MTBs and motor launches and found them very much lacking. In fact he was concerned that using them merely alerted the enemy to possible attacks from more effective larger vessels. Since he was there and we are not, perhaps we should not imply that people like him were incapable of grasping new concepts - he grasped the concept but was open-minded enough to see when it didn't work.
The Germans built coastal torpedo boats just for working the Belgian and Channel coasts during the war. The first series was about 25% bigger than a WW2 E-Boat and they had little success for heavy loss. The later series got bigger and bigger because of the problem of small vessels in reality. As Bacon noted, "As a matter of fact, on one occasion only out of those on which I called on the C.M.B.'s suddenly to take a chance opportunity did the weather permit of their operating ; on the others the weather prevented them from doing so. They always gallantly tried, but the overpowering forces of Nature intervened."
A swarm by e-boats was no more likely to cause significant damage than the years of German attempts with larger craft. Bacon claims that only "one-thousandth part of I per cent" of the vessels escorted by the RN's Dover Patrol were lost, and that the cross-Channel traffic they escorted passed "5,600,000 troops across without an accident to a single man". That was despite heavy attacks by German destroyers and torpedo boats and considerable U-Boat traffic.
Yes, I'm not saying that the protocol was perfect - it clearly wasn't and I agree that the BCF should not have left cordite charges around.
It's just that the safety protocols were wrong because the experiments they depended on were wrong, and that the problem may have been incorrect protocols as much as ignoring the ones that existed.
I understand that the German nitro-cellulose propellant was just a bit less explosive than the British cordite, so even when it did burn, it did not produce the overpressure that blew the hull apart. It deflagrated just slowly enough that it could find a path to escape. To my knowledge, no KM ship, capital ship or cruiser, was destroyed by a magazine explosion.
Here is some period discussion on the topic:
A Direct Train of Cordite - The Dreadnought Project
Another blessing that the KM enjoyed at Jutland and before, was that the British shells sucked. The fuses were bad, the AP caps were too soft, the shell casings were too fragile, and the Lyddite bursting charges were too sensitive and tended to explode on impact, rather than waiting for the fuse to detonate after armour penetration. The Greenboy shells filled with Shellite fixed all these problems and were supplied to the whole Grand Fleet in 1918.
Naval Gazing Main/Shells at Jutland
www.navalgazing.net
Preventing the Germans from sneaking a fleet into a sheltered bay to land a surprise invasion force?
Very unlikely to happen but the French managed it a couple of times in the Napoleonic Wars.
Invasion? No. Sneaking in weapons & explosives to the irish via submarine? Absolutely.
Some RN BCs did prove to be fragile but only 3 were lost and 2 of those were the first Gen BCs of the Invincible class which were little better than the armoured cruisers they were designed to hunt down in terms of armour scheme and this against heavy gun fire that they were never designed to withstand.
The Lion class of BCs 'the splendid cats' on the other hand where superb vessels and they along with the 4 Half sister Kongos of the IJN served their navies very well
Of the modern generation of RN Battlecruisers Queen Mary was lost in WW1 at Jutland but was almost certainly lost due to flash fire down to the magazine as a result of the wrong lessons being applied from Dogger bank in that rate of fire was valued over accuracy resulting in the abandoning of safe ammo handling doctrine 'enjoyed' by the rest of the RN with the stacking of propellent charges and the removal of some anti flash doors to allow the fast movement of ammunition.
By contrast Lion took an absolute kicking at Dogger bank hit 16 times by 11" and 12" shells from the German ships and despite being badly damaged survived and more importantly protected her crew with only 1 fatality and 20 wounded.
At Jutland she was hit even worse with 14 heavy calibre hits including a major fire in her Q turret with 99 dead and 51 wounded but again survived - she did not suffer the same fate as Queen Mary almost certainly due to her senior gunnery officer still applying the 'legacy' ammunition handling methods.
In both cases she was repaired and re-joined the fleet within 2 months.
And it would take more than a extra couple of BCs to make a difference at Jutland - once the Grand fleet suddenly appeared on the horizon forming line the game was up and Scheer was quite correct in picking up his ball and going home as fast as he could.
Given the positions of the Home Fleet, along with the bases in Ireland, that would be some achievement, but even then still doesn't really explain the random one up around Achill?
If that was a direct concern in 1914 these minefields wouldn't prevent such attempt,
I agree, it's the only explanation for mining the west coast that I could think of though.
As for Achill, even now it looks like a bloody awful place to try and land troops in small boats. As someone else suggested, maybe worried about German gun-running to nationalist groups?
Maybe, though a) that might require Dublin Castle being able to get its head out of its collective arse, and b) skips over a lot more accessible and connected areas that could be used for such a purpose?
I mean it isn't important to the Thread so I should stop with the derailment, it just caught my eye when comparing it to say the defences for Cobh, where protective minefields would have made a bit more sense?
Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
I was surprised to find that Jackie Fisher was one of those who believed in "swarms" of TB's in the very early years of the 1900's.
The ideas of the Jeune Ecole lasted for quite a while. And he did sitck with the idea of "go fast, hit hard".
Jackie Fisher was kind of a weird dude. He had lots of very good ideas, but IMHO sometimes he went after radical new concepts just because they were new and/or mold breaking. Regardless of how effective they would actually be, I mean for Christssake the man's "ultimate battleship" was a 35 knot warship with six twenty-inch guns.
You gotta admit it would be awesome! The anime alone writes itself.
But I can't really blame him, tbh. At the time it was pretty clear much of what navies had then wouldn't really have much of an edge over any opponent. The smashing the japanese gave Russia was ample proof of this. Radical solutions were required, so he went looking for them. Granted, a bit too much rum might have been consumed...
Fisher's biggest success as First Sea Lord was getting rid of platforms the RN was hanging onto just to boost ship numbers or out of nostalgia. Even though he started the dreadnought race, British naval expenditures actually decreases in his first few years. And even if every idea of his wasn't a winner, sometimes an organization like the Royal Navy needs someone to shove through radical ideas just to force some kind of innovation.